My wife and I have the house to ourselves for several days over this 4th of July weekend, as my sister invited our kids to visit her in California. This is the first vacation for them away from us, and although they were a little nervous, I think the time is right. I would have liked all four of us to go, but my wife is too sick to travel that far, and I cannot take time off work this month. So the kids get a chance to spend some quality time with their aunt, and we get a sneak preview of the empty nest.

It takes me longer than it should to compose my “out of office” email messages at work. The text of the message itself is quite short; what’s hard is actually pressing the Send button. Intellectually, I know perfectly well that I am allowed and even encouraged to use vacation days. Emotionally, it feels like I’m playing hooky. A holiday, where everyone is out of the office, is so much different than a day where I am home and everyone else is laboring away under a fluorescent glare.

Right. Up. To. HERE. A phrase that goes with a brisk horizontal salute where the speaker’s four fingers indicate the precise level up to which it has been had by them. Bulging eyes and a slight quivering of the hand are optional.

(Note: I worked on this poem a long time, trying to decide between free verse and a much stronger structure. I like the balance of what I ended up with, and what it forced me to omit.)

One thing the Kindle has helped me remember is how much I love to simply sit and read. When I first bought the Kindle, part of my justification was that it would be more portable than the couple of dozen tomes that would otherwise litter the house and the car. The irony is that now I have the Kindle and another couple of dozen physical books lying around.

This came to me tonight. Perhaps I should not give any voice to what my brother calls “post-10:30 thoughts”, but just in case, here they are.

Behold, today in my inbox I received notice that my Kindle has left its nest at Amazon and is wending its way me-ward via FedEx. According to Amazon it has already been registered to me and set up with my existing Amazon account so that I can begin using it right out of the box, without the usual rituals that attend the hatching of consumer electronics. I present another haiku to commemorate this event.

I’m on my third consecutive treatment for conjunctivitis, commonly known as “Pink Eye” or “Hyper-Contagious Eye Snot”. I am not exactly sure what happened.

As my Kindle approaches, I find myself not buying books that I want to read, but rather adding them to a queue, a list I’m keeping for myself of titles that I plan to buy and read electronically. This process is also making me wonder whether or not I’m going to impoverish myself buying more books than I can possibly read. (My wife certainly worries about this.) Wondering about this makes me wonder exactly how many books I’m reading right now and how many I read in a year.

Presenting a haiku on the order status of my Amazon Kindle.

In February of 2007, I had a routine check of my cholesterol and found to my shock that it was considered high, at 222. The last time I’d had it checked, a few years ago, it was under 190. This was at the end of a long and slow program of changing my diet and adding exercise to my life in a sustainable way. I’d started in April 2004, and two years later, in the spring of 2006, I went onto the formal South Beach Diet. I’d lost weight and was feeling good—so what was up with the high cholesterol?

As a fringe member of the cult of Getting Things Done (c. f. David Allen), I keep my inboxes (including my email inbox) nice and clear, shuttling messages into Archive, Action, Respond, Review, and so on. The idea in short is that by doing this context-based sorting you will be more efficient and actually be able to respond to all your email that needs a response. Sounds jiffy, and it is, but the secret battery in this otherwise perfect perpetual motion machine is a weekly three-hour review of what has landed in all those other boxes. Uh huh. If I could find three free hours a week I wouldn’t be in the market for magic organizational schemes.

Can you believe that it’s finally Happy Long Pants Day?

I feel a bit like celebrating because tonight the windows are open and the air conditioning is off, and it’s still nice inside the house. This is the first day since the summer started that we have been able to do that.

I first wrote this back on a Sunday evening in November 2006. I didn’t post it then, but it has been on my mind again. The fish in the poem was my youngest daughter’s betta fish.